MEXICAN FOOD IN KOREA!!!

What’s a So Cal girl supposed to do when she gets the inevitable CRAVINGS for Mexican food in South Korea??? Well, first I moped around and cried, then I put on my big girl pants and figured out how to make it myself!! Now granted you can find “Mexican” food in South Korea, but I want some real home made refried beans and the flavors that I am used to. So for the past couple weeks I have been in the kitchen experimenting….and the results were pretty epic. Friday night we had a FULL MEXICAN FOOD DINNER at our friend’s apartment and it was GREAT!!! Many weeks of tinkering and sweating in the kitchen definitely paid off!

I cooked the meal in advance and then we packed it in a cooler, took it on the scooter to the bus stop, took a 2.5 hour bus ride to Busan, took an hour subway ride to Haeundae, took a 10 minute taxi ride to our buddy’s apartment and then heated it all up on the stove and feasted.

Look at all that yumminess packed in a Styrofoam box!

THE MEAL….

Now this was the first time I had made an entire meal, up until this point I have been just cooking, tinkering with the recipes and re-cooking all the items individually. The meal consisted of:

1. refried beans…you can find cans of refried beans and order them on the internet but canned refried beans have always been nasty and they cost about $6/can= craziness. So I paid $11 for 2 pounds of dried beans (crazy expensive compared to States prices but 100% worth it) and cooked them myself!

2. spanish rice…this one took a bit of work to figure out since I had to use short grain rice which is alot stickier and wet than long grain rice, but figure it out I did!

3. tortillas…yes people, I HANDMADE the TORTILLAS!!!!! the first batch of them were really quite ugly to look at as they looked like amoebas and M’s but now I’m actually pretty good at making them!

4. chicken for tacos… this is not completely perfected but it was really just taco filling so it was good enough (PS thanks mom for sending taco seasoning!!)

So after hours and hours in the kitchen we finally got to sit down (literally we were sitting on the floor eating) and have a full Mexican style meal…it was fantastic!! Needless to say the meal was a huge success…next up on the horizon of things to figure out is ENCHILADAS!!!